5 Ranking Factors That May Surprise You

If you’re new to SEO you may not be aware of some of the ranking factors used by Google to rate your site. Having fresh content and relevant, high quality incoming links are two of the most well known ranking factors, but here are another five that may just surprise you.

• Site loading speed

Google confirmed in April 2010 that site loading speed was a factor they used for search engine rankings. There are a number of tools such as www.webpagetest.org/ that check your site’s loading speed. It’s a well known fact that people have a short attention span online, so if your homepage takes 10 seconds to load up properly, many people won’t hang around.

• Social media activity

In late 2010 representatives of Bing and Google both confirmed that social media activity does have an effect on search engine rankings. If your small business isn’t on popular social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook you could be missing out.

• Positioning of keywords in your text

Another lesser-known ranking factor is the positioning of keywords within your text. For example, if you wanted to optimise your homepage for the term Birmingham builder then you should use this phrase as early as possible within your first line of text.

• Age of your site

How long your site has been around for also plays a part in your online search ranking. The search engines like to give their users results that are authoritative and trustworthy. If your site has only been around for a few months and has no incoming links then you shouldn’t expect it to rank alongside a well-established site.

• Keyword use in title tag

The meta title tag for each of your pages also has a bearing on your search engine rankings. For example, if all your pages simply say ‘welcome’ then you’re missing a trick.

Each of your page (meta) titles should feature a keyword/phrase you want to optimise that page for. This is not only useful in terms of your search ranking; your titles also appear in the search engine results and can help encourage people to click through to your site.

If you liked this post you may also want to read my beginner’s guide to SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.